Anatol Kovarsky, New Yorker Cartoonist for Decades, Dies at 97

Anatol Kovarsky, an artist and illustrator whose sense of whimsy and the absurd made him a fixture at The New Yorker from the late 1940s through the 1960s as both a cartoonist and a cover artist, died on June 1 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Lucille Patton.

Mr. Kovarsky, a master of the wordless visual gag, produced nearly 300 cartoons for The New Yorker. His first, published on March 1, 1947, showed two museum visitors peering at each other in surprise as they looked through the hole in a large Henry Moore-like nude.

Some cartoons had captions, others did not. All had a subtle, intellectual twist.

An artist in his studio, surrounded by great paintings for inspiration, carefully draws a counterfeit bill. A Mayan chief, standing before an enormous ornate stone calendar, chides the hapless artist: “No, no, no! Thirty days hath September!” A man floating on a raft in the ocean, about to be engulfed by Hokusai’s famous wave, says to his fellow castaway, “We’re in Japanese waters, that’s for sure.”

Mr. Kovarsky let his imagination roam freely for his covers, which Art News, in 1978, called “wry and often beautiful excursions into pattern, color, movement and American life.”

Depending on the occasion, he might depict the vast parking lot at a public beach, small marching bands assembled for a St. Patrick’s Day or, in a reference to the 1960 Olympic Games, figures from a Grecian urn running over hurdles, lifting weights and fencing.

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An October 1966 cover by Mr. Kovarsky.CreditThe New Yorker

He was fond of multiplying figures or shapes to create a quilt or frieze pattern, a style that allowed him to play ingenious variations on a single theme. In all, he produced 40 covers for the magazine, starting in the late 1950s.

Anatoly Mironovich Kovarsky was born on April 6, 1919, in Moscow, to a family of wealthy assimilated Jews. His father, Miron, studied piano at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he met his future wife, Zinaida Eisenstadt, a singer.

After the Russian Revolution, Anatol’s father was imprisoned briefly by the Bolsheviks and eventually took his family to Poland, where their surname was spelled Kowarski. After graduating from secondary school in Warsaw, Anatol was sent to Vienna to study economics, as preparation for entering the family leather business. Indulging his real passion, he took lessons from a drawing master on the side.

Abandoning economics, he enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he studied with the post-Impressionist painter Charles Guérin. He also took lessons at the school of the Cubist painter André Lhote.

When the German Army advanced on Paris, he fled with his parents, who had joined him, to Nice and then to Casablanca. In December 1941, the family emigrated to the United States.

Mr. Kovarsky changed the spelling of his name to make it easier to pronounce and briefly added Andrew as a middle name because he liked the sound of it. He enlisted in the Army, which trained him as a topographic draftsman but assigned him as a cartoonist for the publications Stars and Stripes, Yank and Army Talks.

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A December 1961 cover Mr. Kovarsky did for the magazine.CreditThe New Yorker

He accompanied American troops into Normandy and onward to the liberation of Paris. His humorous cartoons for Yank, showing perplexed G.I.’s coping with their new surroundings, were reprinted in The New York Times in 1945, and he contributed similar illustrations to “My Yank Paris,” a book by his Army friend Herbert E. French that was published the same year.

After returning to the United States, he studied painting at Columbia University and the Art Students League and began submitting cartoons to The New Yorker and The New York Herald Tribune.

At the same time he painted in his studio, in a semiabstract style with heavy outlines recalling Rouault and the German Expressionists. His paintings of clowns, dancers, musicians and bullfighters were exhibited in a solo show at the Galerie Hervé in Manhattan in 1956.

Alfred A. Knopf published a collection of his cartoons, “Kovarsky’s World,” in 1956. He illustrated the books “Cycles in Your Life” (1964), by Darrell Huff, and “There Was a Young Lady named Alice and Other Limericks” (1963), by John Armstrong.

In 1969, chafing against the restrictions of the magazine format, Mr. Kovarsky began concentrating on his painting full time. In the 1970s and ’80s, his work was occasionally shown at small galleries.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Lydia Kowarski, and a daughter, Gina Kovarsky.

In 2013, the New Yorker cartoonists Michael Maslin and Liza Donnelly paid Mr. Kovarsky a visit and asked if he was led to cartooning by the work of other artists. “No,” he said, “they just came out of me.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Anatol Kovarsky, 97, New Yorker Cartoonist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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